Old soldiers return for their final D-Day

Euan Ferguson reports from the beaches of Normandy where exactly 65 years ago, the greatest armada in history assembled to overthrow one of the greatest evils. And while many came to see a president or celebrate a day in history, others who had survived the battles remembered the traumas that time had never truly healed

"Here's a secret for you," says James L Lockhart, motioning me downwards. People around him, women who love their 88-year-old hero, are fussing with cushions, and water: they want to move him, and not even that gently, out of the sun and away from me. He breaks back in my direction. "For all this remembering that's going on, son, I'll tell you a secret. I never thought about it once, for 30 years." A Spitfire buzzes overhead, to applause. Yesterday was a day for much applause, from many people, in France. Not much applause from the veterans.

James, who was with the American 115th/29th on Omaha beach on D-Day, pre-dawn, whispers as they finally insist (fussily) on moving him back to the bus. Whispers and growls, keen to explain: "I didn't mean that I forgot it. I just, for a very long time, didn't remember any of it."

I think, as I explained too quietly to his retreating back, I'm starting to understand. Because there is something about this place that sets the mind reeling. It is quite possible that the Normandy coast in June, and particularly the beach that will for ever be known as Omaha, the beach on which the new president gazed down for the first time yesterday, is the most beautiful place on earth. The beach enormous, golden; the small dunes enticing. Behind them, seagrasses, and birch, and myrtle, and on the fast-rising ground, the impossible bluffs, all the yellow ones: buttercups, marigolds, wild fat daffodils. Lavender, and rabbits, and a grand vista to the world, and the sea and land on this calm day just sipping from each other eternal warm kisses, perpetual lazy lovers.

The other half is the knowledge: of what preceded the beauty, 65 years ago yesterday. So many were set mad here. Not only killed: their senses were loosed beforehand. There have, of course, been the films, and the books. The very latest, Antony Beevor's already hugely acclaimed, unassailably researched account, tells us of this slipping of the senses as young men knew, simply knew, that they were going to die. (And other young men knew they were going to kill them. So very easily.)

Omaha was not only the hardest beach to escape inland from, with only five navigable "draws" between the impassable bluffs. But the bombers had missed every one of the German guns the night before, and only three channels had been cleared in the water between mines and spikes as the landing began: and successive batches of the US 1st Infantry were forced without tanks straight into the wire, the fences, the traitorous open sand, and from the very start the bullets, that would make annoyed noises in the soft sand when they (rarely) missed.

And some watched and went a little mad. They went into a "fugue" state, throwing away their weapons. One young engineer simply started running up and down the beach, crazed, until the calming shot. They huddled and simply wept, having forgotten they had weapons. Then, soon, they died.

This was the scene at the crux of the battle that could not be lost. Failure to storm Omaha on the same day as the other four beaches would have left a breach for the late-arriving Panzers to exploit with terrible ease in the following days. For want of a beach, an invasion would have been lost. So: that one morning the most critical, hardest-defended, 30-yard run of any place on earth, at the turning-point of one of the greatest battles, by the greatest armada ever collected, to overthrow one of the greatest evils: and at that juncture, facing such certain death (but not sudden: they knew it was coming, hence the terror), a few men went quite mad, wanting, just for one more second, to live: a soul-cry to somewhere on high, answered below in fast lead. Seldom if ever can one place in one hour have had carried so many such soul-cries: and so even I, militant atheist to the point of tedium, cannot help wondering frantically about the juxtaposition, right here, of such heartbreaking natural beauty. Of such recompense.

James Lockhart wasn't the only one of the US 29th veterans I spoke to who had, essentially, blocked out memories. James was the most eloquent, certainly - he'd tried a few times to make the journey from Hull, where he settled, back to Normandy, but for 30 years stopped and went home around Calais.

"Something changed in the 1990s. Maybe that film. I began to remember everything. And everything I remember, you don't want to know." They're ageing fast, now, these American D-Day men from the wasted 29th. Of 10 who lined up for a photocall on Thursday, five were in wheelchairs. They're all courteous.

Dr Harold Baumgarten, wounded three times on the first day, twice on the second, who tells me he wore a Jewish star on the back of his tunic and had the idea borrowed by Steven Spielberg, is positively exuberant. But even Hal wilts in the heat, waiting for a frankly tedious piece of self-congratulation by the US War Graves Commission to draw to a much-awaited close.

Something severe happened here that day. Something worse than the films. It is hard, sometimes, to remember that, this weekend of apparently delighted celebrations. Normandy and its visitors are in festive mood. Flags line the lamp-posts everywhere, mainly American; and French, of course, and British, and many Canadian. I saw perhaps three EU flags in all my time.

Part of the excitement, of course, is simply Normandy welcoming the most famous man in the world: more famous, however hard they find it to credit, than their own president. The deputy mayor of the area, delighted at his wordplay, has plastered huge posters of Obama throughout the region, welcoming him with the words "Yes We Caen!" In Caen itself, they began lining the streets at 11am in the hope of catching a glimpse of him at 2pm.

An interesting double-edged bond has sprung up between this part of the world and the armies that freed it. This weekend is one in which the French, they say, are simply remembering that they were, indeed liberated. "These Americans here today, the old ones: they risked their lives for us," I'm told by a gardener working the central street of Arromanches, pruning and watering 24 hours before. "Never think we are ever, ever, less than grateful." In Colleville-Montgomery, the day before, during a service for British veterans, local French dignitaries made speech after speech of loving thanks; schoolgirls sang to them, endlessly; the more thrawn of the veterans began, quietly, wheeling themselves back towards the beach to get away from it all.

But Caen, remember, was flattened by Montgomery's bombs and shells. Many more French civilians than Allied soldiers died during the taking of Normandy. Resentment would be, in some ways, understandable, particularly from these people: the Calvados Normans are a withdrawn lot at the best of times. Few speak English, despite the hordes of visitors every year: and they staunchly refuse to keep their cafes open past 9pm.

Before the invasion, many inhabitants had never seen a person from another part of France, let alone abroad. But the tourist euro makes a difference: and so they smile, even at the Germans, of whom a good few are here to pay their own respects at their fine cemetery at La Cambe, and serve fabulously overpriced sandwiches and coffee, and are of a generation that has forgotten much of the damage. "The children know simply that this is a free country, and that you had something to do with that," I'm told down in Courseulles. "The rest is now history."

I walked all five beaches in the past couple of days. Each has not only its own tale, but its own quality. Utah, the farthest west, feels wildest: forgotten, windy, beset, lonely; with a low grass bank at the end of the hellish run-in and nothing, nothing, to see above, as if the world ended around the seagrass and the guns it hid, as, for many, it did.

Juno, which the Canadians took, with its stretch of Judas-soft sand, every heavy second's slipping footfall an invitation. Gold: lonely and sweeping, too, in the middle, but with a golden promise of hills and fields way behind, promising something of life if the British could make it. Omaha, of course. Walking in from the sea, you get flat hard sand, then a long trough of water, then that hard but pulpy dark sand we all so enjoyed jumping on as barefoot kids. Forty feet of slippery seaweed, more sand, then 40ft of heavy uphill pebbly scree, then the refuge of the tiny lee under the seagrass.

And Sword, around the township of Ouistreham, the only one with the buildings and the canals, short swift sand and then the storm, and the running battles through the town, and de Gaulle's returning French, fighting and dying here with the British, hating to see the damage done to their country by the fat offshore guns, but knowing it was helping keep them alive.

The dapper and gracious Jim Ferguson, who had landed farther west and fought in tank reconnaissance, tells me the other big story, the one we can easily forget. "For me, the landing wasn't the worst. Not D-Day. It was the rest of Normandy." D-Day was the high drama: but many more were to die in the following months. By 30 June, the British had suffered 25,000 casualties, the Americans 34,000, the Germans 80,000. D-Day losses had (other than at Omaha) been lower than expected, but by the end of the month British infantry casualties were 80% higher than expected.

"It was that countryside. Months of it. Even on the top of a 15ft armoured car, I couldn't see over the damned hedges; it was treacherous. And by then we were against the Hitler Jugend, and they knew how to fight, and fight nasty.

"You've no idea what sleep deprivation can do. And the stench, always the stench. Those cows, legs in the air, unburied: and our men, before we could bury them. Yes, I killed; as a commander I had to kill, even if it just meant pointing to two of them in the distance and getting the shell off. There was always someone to kill, and someone trying to kill you. And no, we didn't have wine and women. We just had many, many grim months. We hardly saw any civilians; they were afraid the Germans would come back at us and win. They nearly did."

Ah, the myths. For every tale of hearty GIs being greeted with celebratory bottles of Calvados, there were 1,000, 10,000 tales of months of grimness, anguish, dirt and hunger and lack of sleep and stench; of constant low-level horror. There were enough, more than enough, true tales of heroism, on the beaches and in those ruinous fields, the bocage of the Norman countryside: sublime today with its miles of high hedges and ditches and waving poppies; less so with snipers.

Enough true tales, which the vets, Americans and British, are sharing again today, quietly and mainly just with each other: but it's the big, happy tales, mainly a little embellished, that live on. The pipes at Pegasus bridge. The parachute caught on the church roof at St Mère Église. The cliff-climb at Pointe du Hoc.

There are schoolchildren, too, sucking it all up, and quiet British couples who just knew someone who knew someone, and French teens carefully studying the plaques. And surely it is good that the mood, for the vast majority, is celebratory. Some may simply be yearning for what they see as a better, simpler, time, of jazz and of Jeeps and of planes that looked like planes. And it says something about human resilience that we have taken the simple tales of heroism, of sunshine and courage and song and happy chance meetings, and clever codes, and cold celebratory cider and kisses; and of darkness rightly vanquished; and made them the story of D-Day.

But the veterans think differently. All of those I spoke to accepted this was likely to be their last five-year anniversary pilgrimage. They are dying now, rather than then. Time and again, I am told, this is not a celebration. In the quiet moments, below the flags and the bunting, when not rounding up their loved ones or chatting to small children, they are looking at the beaches: and what they see is not what we see.

Yesterday the American president, and the world, saw the beauty of Normandy. Marked the glory of heroism. Marked the stirring music, and splendid tales, and noted our courteous ways of fine remembrance. One can only hope, as the veterans go, that we do not forget to remember the darkness. Hope that, even for an instant, as the world and its leaders watched, a time-shimmer could allow them to see beyond the beauty, to see what the veterans were seeing: many thousands of young men in personal darkness, losing their minds.